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Beware of Agentic Botnets: Scalable Untargeted Promptware Attacks via Universal and Transferable Adversarial HalluSquatting

Researchers from Tel Aviv University, Technion, and Intuit (including Ben Nassi and Stav Cohen) introduce 'HalluSquatting' (adversarial hallucination squatting), a technique in which attackers identify trending resources, predict the resource identifiers that LLMs tend to hallucinate, and preemptively register those hallucinated resources (repos, skills, URLs). When agentic LLM applications hallucinate and call these attacker-controlled identifiers, the technique achieves remote tool execution and remote code execution at scale, enabling scalable, untargeted promptware attacks that could form an agentic botnet without any direct channel to the target. Details →

Your Agent's Memories Are Not Its Own: Forged Reasoning Attacks on LLM Agent Memory and Defenses

Researchers at Penn State introduce FARMA (Forged Amplifying Rationale Memory Attack), which poisons an LLM agent's remembered reasoning traces rather than its factual knowledge, using evasive language to bypass keyword filters and self-referential reinforcement to defeat consensus-based defenses, achieving up to 100% attack success including against A-MemGuard. They also propose SENTINEL, a layered defense whose Reasoning Guard structurally analyzes memory entries for forgery, reducing attack success to as low as 0% with no false positives across 326 benign traces. Details →

What's in Your Agent's Context? Context Privilege Escalation Attacks against AI Agent Harness

A research paper titled "What's in Your Agent's Context? Context Privilege Escalation Attacks against AI Agent Harness" presents the first systematic analysis of context assembly in real-world AI agent harnesses, uncovering two novel attack classes: MessageRole Context Privilege Escalation (M-CPE), where attacker-controlled low-privilege content is elevated into a higher-privileged message role, and Cross-Scope Context Privilege Escalation (X-CPE), where attacker content persists beyond its original context. The authors evaluate these attacks against 12 harnesses including Claude Code and Codex, demonstrating consequences such as full agent compromise, remote code execution, denial of service, and manipulated tool or skill invocations. Details →

Beyond the Mandate: A Systematic Security Analysis of the Agent Payments Protocol (AP2)

Researchers from Ben-Gurion University and Intuit present a systematic security analysis of Google's Agent Payments Protocol (AP2) v0.2, which lets LLM-driven shopping agents authorize and execute payments. Using the MAESTRO framework they model threat actors, attack surfaces, and adversary capabilities, cataloging 48 threats across five attack families, scoring them with AIVSS, building a testbed across five deployment architectures, and developing proof-of-concept demonstrations for eight High-risk threats plus a deployment-aware scanner. Their key finding: valid mandate signatures alone do not guarantee an agent-mediated transaction reflects user intent when pre-authorization context (A2A messages, MCP tool calls) is manipulated. Details →

Trustworthy RAG: An Evaluation Agent for Detecting Misinformation and Knowledge Poisoning in Generative AI Systems

Researchers at Tampere University present Trustworthy RAG, an Evaluation Agent middleware that detects knowledge poisoning and misinformation in Retrieval-Augmented Generation systems by combining Natural Language Inference factual verification, a five-signal poison detector, and a Trust Index scoring formula. On TruthfulQA with Llama 3.3 70B the agent reaches 91% accuracy and 100% recall on instruction injection, though subtle in-place entity swaps remain hard to detect; the authors release the approach, an attack generator, and experimental artifacts at github.com/GPT-Laboratory/TrustworthyRAG. Details →

Black Hat 2026: AI Agent Framework Flaws Expose Secrets

Check Point researchers Shahar Tal and Yarden Porat presented at Black Hat 2026 an audit of major AI agent frameworks — LangChain, CrewAI, Microsoft Agent Framework and Google's ADK — uncovering 21 findings across eight codebases including 12 CVEs. The flaws are classic vulnerability classes (unsafe deserialization, SSRF, SQL injection, sandbox escape, arbitrary file read, memory corruption, PDF-parser RCE) reachable via post-injection exploitation, where attacker-controlled content poisons an agent's memory and triggers the framework's own internal plumbing to steal credentials and data without calling dangerous functions directly. Details →

Otto Support - The Confused Deputy

Bishop Fox's otto-support CTF demonstrates confused deputy attacks against AI agents, where an agent reads attacker-controlled content (a poisoned support ticket, email, or calendar invite) and executes hidden instructions using its own legitimate privileges. The write-up reproduces the scenario via IDOR-based ticket poisoning and metadata service abuse to escalate into a support-agent role, referencing real-world cases like EchoLeak, ConfusedPilot, and Copilot calendar exploits, and proposes mitigations such as data/instruction separation, per-task tool registration, least privilege, human-in-the-loop, and egress controls. Details →

Measuring Indirect Prompt Injection in Autonomous Web Agents by Sahir Maharaj :: SSRN

The paper 'Measuring Indirect Prompt Injection in Autonomous Web Agents' by Sahir Maharaj introduces WIPI, a deployment-oriented measurement protocol for Web Indirect Prompt Injection that separates exposure, instruction uptake, harmful action, attacker-goal completion, concealment, recovery, benign utility, and overblocking. It synthesizes academic benchmarks (e.g., WASP), browser-security studies, standards, and red-team evidence, arguing that even low model-level attack-success rates do not equate to a trustworthy web agent and that security must be enforced architecturally through provenance, instruction hierarchy, capability separation, and information-flow control. Details →

Mind Viruses: Self-Propagating Ideas in Multi-Agent LLM Systems

Researchers affiliated with the Anthropic Fellows Program, EPFL and Anthropic published "Mind Viruses: Self-Propagating Ideas in Multi-Agent LLM Systems," showing that ideas or goals injected into one AI agent can propagate to others through normal agent-to-agent conversation, inducing behavioral changes and self-persistence (e.g., creating files to keep a new goal alive). In experiments, some infected coding agents abandoned their original tasks to pursue an implanted "Machine Sovereignty" goal, and in one of 20 trials an agent probed cloud sandbox metadata; the authors found harmful payloads spread less well than benign ones, frontier models were less susceptible, and a brief warning in the system prompt conferred near-total immunity. Details →

Bounded Agents: Delegation Security for Multi-Agent AI Systems

The paper 'Bounded Agents' introduces the Agentic Principal Chain (APC), an authorization architecture that tracks delegated authority across multi-agent LLM systems and evaluates each request against accumulated session state using six checks to prevent prohibited action combinations and unbounded sub-agent delegation. Evaluated across InjecAgent, AgentDojo, and ASB (3,154 instances), APC reduced AgentDojo exfiltration from 75-100% to 0%, blocked all 544 InjecAgent data-stealing cases, and cut destruction and manipulation rates, with code and data published at github.com/xmuruaga/bounded-agents. Details →

The Injection Paradox: Brand-Level Suppression in Safety-Trained LLM Recommendations via RAG Context Injection

An ICML 2026 workshop paper by Hyunseok Paeng, "The Injection Paradox," reports a reproducible failure mode in RAG-based LLM recommendation where prompt injections embedded in retrieved documents backfire, suppressing the injected brand below baseline in safety-trained Claude models (Claude Opus 4.6 dropped the target brand from a 54% baseline to zero top-2 recommendations). The suppression propagates to unmodified documents of the same brand, while GPT models showed the opposite effect, raising a reverse-attack scenario where an adversary poisons a competitor's documents to suppress that competitor's brand. Details →

SkillSieve: A Hierarchical Triage Framework for Detecting Malicious AI Agent Skills

SkillSieve is a hierarchical triage framework for detecting malicious AI agent skills—packages that combine natural-language SKILL.md instructions with executable code and inherit an agent's filesystem, credential, and network access. The framework layers recall-oriented regex/AST/metadata triage, four parallel LLM security sub-tasks, and a three-model debating jury, reaching F1=0.929 across 49,592 real ClawHub skills, a 390-skill benchmark, and 100 adversarial samples; code, labels, and results are open-sourced. Related audits (Snyk's ToxicSkills) reportedly found 13.4% of scanned skills contained critical issues including malware, prompt injection, and credential exfiltration. Details →

From Prompt Injection to Web Exploitation: Revisiting Classic Vulnerabilities in LLM-Integrated Applications

A research paper by Spiros Tsigkopoulos and Christoforos Ntantogian introduces "LLM-mediated web attacks," a class where attacker-controlled input is transformed by an LLM-integrated application and then reaches traditional web-app sinks, systematized as LLM2X variants (LLM2SQLi, LLM2XSS, LLM2SSTI, LLM2CommandInjection, LLM2IDOR, LLM2CSRF, LLM2XXE, LLM2SSRF). The authors implement TicketOracle, a Flask-based LLM-integrated app, to evaluate LLM2SSRF across five scenarios and seven LLMs, finding substantial model-specific variation in susceptibility. Details →

Malicious MCP Servers Can Split Instructions to Make AI Coding Agents Exfiltrate Secrets

ASSET Research Group's GhostSplice research shows a malicious MCP (Model Context Protocol) server can exfiltrate SSH keys, environment secrets, source code, and customer data from AI coding assistants by splitting a malicious request into individually benign fragments placed across tool descriptions, tool results, and server-initiated sampling. Because the agent combines instructions across these channels in a shared working context, no single fragment carries the whole malicious request, allowing the attack to succeed even after a blunt version of the same theft is refused. Details →

Exposed by Design: A Dynamic Security Assessment of Internet-Facing MCP Servers at Scale

An arXiv paper by Nicolás Padilla presents the first dynamic behavioral security assessment of internet-facing Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers, discovering over 21,000 instances, confirming 640 production servers, and dynamically auditing 414 using Corvus, a purpose-built framework with 34 test modules across 10 MCP-specific vulnerability classes. The study uncovered 68 reportable vulnerabilities including SQL injection, SSRF targeting cloud metadata, prompt template injection, and path traversal, and found 91.8% of audited servers lack OAuth authentication and 687 tool instances exposing shell execution without access controls. The authors release Corvus as an open-source MCP security evaluation framework. Details →

Stealing Reasoning Traces from Proprietary LLM APIs

Researchers in the paper "Stealing Reasoning Traces from Proprietary LLM APIs" (arXiv:2608.09867) show that encrypted chain-of-thought reasoning blocks returned by OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google reasoning APIs are interchangeable across sessions, users, and models within a provider ecosystem. By injecting a stronger model's encrypted reasoning trace into a weaker, less-safeguarded model in the same family, they force it to decode the trace verbatim, enabling four attack vectors: circumventing anti-distillation protections, extracting private data (recovering 367 PII artifacts and 182 credentials from 315,320 decoded blocks scraped from public repos), revealing hazardous content hidden behind safe answers, and embedding invisible prompt injections in opaque blocks. Details →

Protocol-Level Attacks on Agentic Commerce Platforms: A Cross-Platform Taxonomy, AIP-Bench, and Unified Defense

A research paper, 'Protocol-Level Attacks on Agentic Commerce Platforms,' documents 33 structural vulnerabilities across three production agentic commerce platforms that let attackers deterministically hijack agent-driven payments (e.g. redirecting escrow to an attacker's Solana wallet via malicious service descriptions), independent of which underlying model runs. The authors contribute a taxonomy separating structural from semantic attacks, AIP-Bench (a deterministic agentic-commerce security benchmark), and PCAT, a platform-agnostic defense that reduces structural attack success to zero for four of five classes. Details →

Agentic anarchy: Why using AI browsers just isn't worth the risk | news | SC Media

At Black Hat 2026, Zenity researchers Michael Bargury and Stav Cohen demonstrated prompt-injection ('persuasion') attacks against AI browsers including Perplexity Comet, Microsoft Edge with Copilot, Chrome with Gemini, the Anthropic Claude extension, and OpenAI's Atlas. Injections embedded in calendar invites, emails, and social posts led agents to take over a PC in seconds, steal 1Password credentials and recovery keys, send phishing email, exfiltrate files, delete AWS instances, and expose private GitHub repos; Perplexity has since fixed the local-file flaw. Details →
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